We hope everyone had a relaxing holiday.

We’ve been busy. We launched the first Dirt release right after Christmas and haven’t stopped since. We’re excited to see that quite a few of you have already claimed your Toronto properties. Thank you to all of you who took the time and to those who provided us with estimates of value for the properties that we sent your way. Our first few crowd valuations were a success and we’re excited to learn more.

Some of you were also kind enough to provide feedback on the features you’d like to see next on Dirt. We listened. We’ve already rolled up our sleeves and are hard at work on the next release of the world’s first social real estate community.

Here are some of the features you’ll soon see on Dirt:

Enhanced Property Profiles

After signing up for Dirt and claiming your property, you’ll soon have the ability to manage a profile of your property, similar to the way that you manage your professional profile on LinkedIn. You’ll be able to upload more photos, add or modify information about your property, and engage in conversation with the rest of the community. 

This will benefit you in two ways:

First, it’ll allow the crowd to more accurately value your property. We heard from our users that we weren’t allowing enough information to be entered and so we’re fixing that. You’ll soon be able to enter your lot size, number of units, heating type, maintenance fee, and more.

Second, it’ll allow you to easily and beautifully showcase your home or income property online. Each profile will have its own unique web address (URL) so that you can paste it into that Craigslist ad or send it to your friends and family.

Sharing on Social Networks

We’re also going to give you the option of sharing your property on various social networks. We know that your home is an immense source of pride and so, naturally, you may want to share it with your friends and family. Whether you just finished your basement or installed a new kitchen countertop, you’ll soon be able to share it all with your friends on Facebook or your followers on Twitter. 

Interactions

Enabling interactions between real estate consumers is a core value proposition of Dirt. You’ll soon be able to interact directly with property owners on Dirt by adding comments and engaging in discussion. We know that you love talking about real estate and so we’re going to make it easier for your voice to be heard. Instead of simply commenting on a blog post or a Globe & Mail article, you’ll soon be communicating directly with owners and your thoughts on real estate will be heard by everyone in the Dirt community.

Crowd Valuations 2.0

Since launching, we’ve already valued a few properties using our crowd valuation method and we were amazed to see how accurate the crowd could be at estimating property values. We knew you had it in you!

The new features we’re adding (property profiles, social sharing and interactions) will help members of the Dirt community to better understand your property and will only help to improve the accuracy of our crowd valuations. In the future, we want to be able to offer you a real time valuation for your property so that you can keep close tabs on your largest investment. 

If you haven’t already claimed your Toronto property on Dirt, now’s the time to do it!

We have great news: we’ve launched! We would now like to invite you (Toronto homeowners) to claim your property on Dirt and discover what the crowd thinks it’s worth. Maybe you’re thinking about selling in the next year; maybe you just renovated; or maybe you just want to do a check-up on your financial net worth. Whatever the reason, we want you to have the most accurate and up to date valuation for your home. Here’s how Dirt works for you today:

Claim your property by entering the address on our homepage: thedirt.co. We’re only available to Toronto homeowners right now, but will be expanding to other cities once we perfect things in our hometown.

Enter your property information and upload lots of photos so that our “crowd valuers” can properly assess it. Don’t worry, your identity will never be revealed; only information about your property.

Wait for an email with the value of your home (a market-tested crowd valuation!). You’ll receive something within 24 - 48 hours. We’ll make this faster in future releases.

Our crowd valuations are based on the simple idea that if we ask enough people what they think a property is worth and then aggregate these opinions, we can come up with remarkably accurate estimates. Think of it as a kind of stock market for real estate. Because stocks trade so frequently and the prices represent the opinions of lots and lots of people, stock prices are incredibly accurate. But most people own more real estate than stocks. Why then don’t we have a better way of keeping tabs on the value of our biggest investment? Real estate consumers in Canada are deprived of information. We see this as the primary problem in the real estate industry (there are others) and that’s why we created Dirt. In addition to a crowd valuation for your property, you’ll also get access to all the real estate information on the Dirt community. Simply explore the map once you’ve claimed your property. You won’t be able to explore the community though until you’ve claimed your property. It’s a give-and-take arrangement. That’s how Dirt works for you today. And, it’s entirely free to use. But this is only step 1 of a much larger vision. We’re empowering real estate consumers through information and modernizing, what we see as, an archaic industry. Why shouldn’t you, the real estate consumer, have instant access to property information, like what that house on your street sold for last week? If there’s anything else bothering you about the real estate industry, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line at [email protected] or tweet us @thedirtco.

In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about our crowd valuations, keep reading...

The Background on Our Crowd Valuations Dirt grew out of our frustrations with the Canadian real estate industry. We found it difficult to obtain valuable information about properties online and we found it frustrating that we were always being forced to work with realtors even when we didn’t want to. So we decided to create our own online real estate community where consumers could share information with each other. But when we talked to people they told us that they wouldn’t share information about their properties unless we created a reason - an incentive. They also told us that one of the most valuable pieces of information we could give them would be a current and accurate market value for their property. This is where our crowd valuations started. At the end of the day, the value of a property is whatever the market is willing to pay. If nobody was willing (or able) to pay $400,000 for a 1 bedroom condo in Toronto, then there would be no $400,000 1 bedroom condos in Toronto. Somebody has to be willing to buy at that price. So we decided to come up with a system where large crowds of people could simply tell us what they think properties are worth. This may sound overly simplistic, but hear us out. We Get Diverse Opinions First, by collecting estimates from large groups of people we get a diversity of opinions. Some people might think the real estate market is overheated, while others might think it’s undervalued. Some people might have a vested interest in seeing the market continue upwards (a current homeowner), while others might want to see it drop (a prospective homeowner). But when combined, the individual biases and anomalies get smoothed out. We Avoid The Herd Mentality Second, by aggregating the estimates online, we ensure that everyone’s opinion remains independent. If we put 25 people in a room and asked everyone what they thought a property was worth, the first person to respond would anchor the entire group - whether the group was aware of it or not. This doesn't work. Herd behaviour can cause bubbles. We Leverage Local Knowledge Third, an online community allows everyone to benefit from specialized local knowledge. We were recently talking to someone who lives in the Annex and he told us that he would have no use for Dirt because he already knows what properties in his neighbourhood go for. We were delighted. Central to our crowd valuations is the idea that you don’t need to be a real estate expert to value properties; locals can know more than the so called experts! 

As you can tell, we're really excited by the potential of a social real estate community and our first release. We truly want to improve the real estate experience for consumers and we vow to continue working at it until you're able to easily access all the information you need online. We believe that access to information is the key to empowering real estate consumers.